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The mobile apocalypse?

A little over a decade ago, I remember watching the firewall on my computer logging literally hundreds of probes per minute during the peak of a particularly nasty worm outbreak on the Net.

I forget which worm it was, perhaps Blaster, perhaps Code Red, but the effect was the same -- all over the internet huge numbers of computers were being compromised or brought to their knees by an infectious piece of malware that was reproducing at an alarming rate.

Of course this was a long time ago, in Net-years, so while the effects were annoying, they weren't super-critical.

Way back then, people still relied on voice calls, letters and faxes to a far greater extent than they do in today's Net-based world.

The risk of another crippling worm still exists but the major vector for such malware (Microsoft Windows) has been significantly hardened since those days of old, so the chances have reduced somewhat -- but there is another huge vulnerability we need to worry about.

I'm talking about smartphones.

The reality is that a huge number of businesses and individuals are now incredibly reliant on their mobile computing devices to efficiently complete their daily tasks and "stay in touch".

Despite the best efforts of mobile manufacturers, we've already seen some instances of malware on these devices but nobody has yet managed to create a super-worm.

To date, one of the reasons for this has been that there hasn't really been a mobile equivalent of the Windows operating system. By that I mean that mobile operating systems were many and varied -- effectively limiting the scope of any individual piece of malware.

However, things are now changing and already two major players have emerged: iOS and Android.

Now that the industry has effectively consolidated into these two camps, the job of any malware writer hoping to take over the world has been vastly simplified.

He who finds a suitably large hole in the Android OS could quite possibly cripple a huge percentage of the world's smart phones in next to no time.

Given the amount of energy that various governments around the world are devoting to the matter of cyberwarfare, one can't help but wonder how many very effective pieces of mobile malware are being stockpiled - just in case.

I suspect that taking down major mobile networks by injecting a highly infectious piece of smartphone malware would be a crucial strategy in any major conflict these days. An adversary who can't communicate is a weak adversary.

For this reason, I wonder if perhaps our smartphones ought not have a "safe mode" in which all they do is allow you to place voice calls and send SMS messages -- effectively turning them into a "unsmart phone". Assuming that there were no vulnerabilities when running in this mode (far easier to thoroughly test and validate) then at least we would have a fall-back level of comms in the event cyberwar was declared.

How would *you* cope if the mobile networks crashed due to a massive and highly infectious smartphone malware outbreak?

Given the resources being thrown at cyber-warfare, should we have a strategy in place for mitigating such a possibility?

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